Wednesday, June 30, 2010

More is More!

While in school working on my Bachelors several years ago I signed up for a life drawing class. The class had thirteen students gathered around nude male and female models. If you want to learn how to really draw a human body you have to be able to see what you’re drawing.

My kids are going through my backpack, and start looking at the text book for the class. “OHHH does MOM know you have this?” They had a lot of questions. As I remember it, I went through how my text book wasn’t a Playboy, and how Mom signed me up for the class, so yes she knew there was going to be a “naked” lady in the classroom.

Drawing the human body is fascinating. It’s the way the light falls on the muscles. It’s the lines and shape the skeleton forms. So fascinating that I even forgot the model was nude one time. I was talking to her about one of the kids being sick. She was studying nutrition, so the conversation went on and on about vitamins, and my son’s health history......until the teacher shut us up!

It was only then that I remembered I had been talking to a young woman with no cloths on!

It is one thing to draw thin-ish models, and quite another to draw someone like me. I have about one hundred pounds on those classroom models, which makes it harder to render a figure like that right. Now, women that weight that much are even more difficult to draw. I'm liking the idea of that challenge. These promotional pieces are drawn without models. I haven’t found a good way to approach a “big and beautiful woman” and asking her to let me draw her naked!

To be honest, I don't thing there is a right way. Here are the pieces.I’ll fill you in more later about the things I've learned from this project.